FOOTNOTES: 

[1] And here I may as well mention a curious incident.  When I wrote my poem, I had never seen Niagara; but we agreed to go together on a pilgrimage at our earliest convenience.  One thing and another happened, until I had been abroad and returned, without our seeing it together.  At last, being about to go to the South of Europe, I made a new arrangement with him; but just as we—­my wife and I—­were ready to go, he was called away to consecrate some church in the West, and we started on a journey of two thousand miles through portions of our country I had never seen, and was ashamed to go abroad again without seeing.  On my way back we stopped in Buffalo, and as I stood in the piazza I saw a little card on one of the pillars saying that the Rev. Mr. Pierpont would preach in the evening somewhere.  I found him, and we went together at last, and saw Niagara together, as we had agreed to do forty years before.  And that night the heavens rained fire upon us, and the great November star-shooting occurred, and our landlord, being no poet, was unwilling to disturb us, so that we missed the show altogether.

* * * * *

MY GARDEN.

    If I could put my woods in song,
    And tell what’s there enjoyed,
    All men would to my gardens throng,
    And leave the cities void.

    In my plot no tulips blow,
    Snow-loving pines and oaks instead,
    And rank the savage maples grow
    From spring’s faint flush to autumn red.

    My garden is a forest-ledge,
    Which older forests bound;
    The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge,
    Then plunge in depths profound.

    Here once the Deluge ploughed,
    Laid the terraces, one by one;
    Ebbing later whence it flowed,
    They bleach and dry in the sun.

    The sowers made haste to depart,
    The wind and the birds which sowed it;
    Not for fame, nor by rules of art,
    Planted these and tempests flowed it.

    Waters that wash my garden-side
    Play not in Nature’s lawful web,
    They heed not moon or solar tide,—­
    Five years elapse from flood to ebb.

    Hither hasted, in old time, Jove,
    And every god,—­none did refuse;
    And be sure at last came Love,
    And after Love, the Muse.

    Keen ears can catch a syllable,
    As if one spake to another
    In the hemlocks tall, untamable,
    And what the whispering grasses smother.

    AEolian harps in the pine
    Ring with the song of the Fates;
    Infant Bacchus in the vine,—­
    Far distant yet his chorus waits.

    Canst thou copy in verse one chime
    Of the wood-bell’s peal and cry? 
    Write in a book the morning’s prime,
    Or match with words that tender sky?